


When There’s Nothing Left to Burn

by Flightlesskiwi



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Brief References to Alcohol, Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, New Year's Eve, New Year’s Day, Post-AC 3, Setting Things on Fire, Shaun and Rebecca’s friendship, Sort of? - Freeform, You know for catharsis and stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-05
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:20:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25731256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flightlesskiwi/pseuds/Flightlesskiwi
Summary: Shaun looks around his dingy Glasgow studio flat on New Year’s Day, boxes of files closing in around him, the suitcase he’s been living out of staring unsympathetically at him from its place on the floor.
Relationships: Rebecca Crane & Shaun Hastings, Shaun Hastings/Desmond Miles
Comments: 10
Kudos: 16





	When There’s Nothing Left to Burn

**Author's Note:**

> This little fic has been sitting in my drafts since the start of twenty-twenty, I’m not sure why it’s take me so long to finish it, given that it’s so short. 
> 
> The year so far has been a bit chaotic and quarantine hasn’t been particularly kind to my mental health, so it’s nice to do something short. That said, I’m not abandoning tte, I have every intention of getting back to it thank you all for your patience! 
> 
> An additional thanks is owed to [ boxofrogs ](%E2%80%9C) for betaing this little fic and helping me figure out what I wanted from it, he writes some great ac stuff of his own that I highly recommend! 
> 
> The references to drinking are in the second and fourth paragraph if you want to avoid them, let me know if there’s anything else that requires a warning or tag. 
> 
> Title quote is from Your Ex-Lover is Dead by Stars which is definitely on my shaundes playlist and poetry quotes are from Burning the Old Year by Naomi Shihab Nye, which inspired this fic. Enjoy!

_  
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,  
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.  
I begin again with the smallest numbers._

* * *

New Year hits him hard, like a hammer to the back of the skull. The last days of December had passed in a haze, bright Christmas lights blurred by grief. The few of them that were left had stumbled upon New Year’s Eve, legs still shaky with everything they’d lost.

Rebecca had dragged him out for drinks. And they’d drank, until Shaun was shouting along to Auld Lang Syne. Until he stopped thinking about William, or Lucy, or Desmond and could kiss a handsome stranger at midnight without feeling guilty, without feeling much of anything aside from the warm void that too much alcohol brings. 

Afterward there was a taxi with Rebecca crying on his shoulder on the ride to her flat. They were large ugly tears, full of too much aching sadness to be anything else, that soaked into his shirt and made it stiff with salt. Shaun just looked out the window and watched the glaze of the city lights on the wet streets, stroking his hand across her hair and babbling hollow words of comfort.

He’d walked Rebecca up to her front door, watched her attempt to put the key in the lock twice before she turned to him for help. Shaun helped her inside and left her, lying on her couch with a glass of water and two paracetamol for the morning. Rebecca was better than him at holding her liquor, but she’d out drank him by several shots. Running from something neither of them could escape, no matter how hard and fast they drank. 

The meter was still running on the cab and as he’d dictated his address to the driver Shaun had wondered, in a sinking sort of way, if he and Rebecca could survive this, if they could recover their friendship after it had the middle so thoroughly torn out. If they could escape the spectres now hanging over their heads. It seemed cruel, to have lost and lost and lost, only to lose again simply from the weight of all those losses stacked on top of each other. 

But then, life was nothing if not cruel and he cursed himself for having so easily forgotten that somewhere between the house in Monteriggioni and the cave in New York.

Regardless, Shaun thought as he stumbled into his own flat, he would make it work. They’d survived it all before -losses and grief- they would this time as well. He couldn’t lose Rebecca. Without her around he had very little left to lose at all. 

* * *

Shaun looks around his dingy Glasgow studio flat on New Year’s Day, boxes of files closing in around him, the suitcase he’s been living out of staring unsympathetically at him from its place on the floor. 

He feels empty, hollowed out by grief and alcohol, and spares a thought for Rebecca, also waking up alone and hungover a few blocks away. Shaun could have stayed with her, but some feelings are too big and they have a way of filling the room like an invisible gas, choking out all the oxygen. He briefly entertains the idea of striking a match, just to see if it’s flammable, just to watch everything burn away.

Instead he gets up and makes tea, forgoing breakfast because even the thought makes him heave, and sits at the tiny, wobbly table in his kitchen. The shortest leg has three manila folders stuck under it, but the whole thing still shifts violently every time he moves, a thoroughly depressing metaphor for his life. He looks down at them, squinting past his headache to read the text scribbled on the front. _Italy, Basillica di San Lorenzo._ The words make anger fizz up inside him and he kicks out at the folder, trying to banish another cruel reminder. Instead he stubs his toe on the table leg, lets out a string of curses, and slumps back into his chair. 

_What would Desmond think of you now, hmm?_ The thought comes to him, poisonous and resentful, because he knows. He’s very much aware that he’s pathetic, thank you. Less than a month ago he was helping save the world and now he’s nothing, a washed up once-academic, once-Assassin turned into a man with nothing in his life but one solitary friend and useless piles of paper. It feels like he’s been all used up, and it’s ridiculous because Desmond had only barely been something to him. 

It shouldn’t have hurt this much to have it taken away. It shouldn’t, but it still does. 

Maybe it’s because of the _barely_ of it all. The almost brush of their hands, the something that had sparkled in Desmond’s dark eyes, the curve of his lip as he smirked, the warmth radiating off him that Shaun never got to feel against his skin. The nearness that was never near enough, the closeness that never got any closer. The potential energy that never turned kinetic and now has nowhere to go. Shaun looks down and considers _Italy, Basillica di San Lorenzo._

An idea, half formed and decidedly stupid takes hold and pulls him to his feet. Shaun pulls the kitchen bin out into the sitting area, the metal screeching against the wood in sharp protest. The sound barely reaches him and with single minded focus he turns and rummages through his suitcase, emerging triumphant with an almost empty plastic lighter and the conviction to complete his ritual. 

The files go into the bin, all of them. All those cities of the “Holy Land”: Masyaf, Jerusalem, Acre, Damascus, every last street, every last assassin. Italy: Florence, Tuscany, Rome, every last church, every last historical figure. America: Boston, New York, every last bloody battle, every last life lost and land stolen. On top of them he piles modern day files, notes on power cells, the bleeding effect, the precursors, every last sickening reminder. He takes a particularly fat stack of papers regarding the Apple and tosses them in, curling one remaining sheet in his hand to catch the lighter’s flame.

Then he burns it. All of that time, all of that effort, months of research and late nights, years and years of history gone up in smoke. 

He’d had a fireplace once, in his mother’s townhouse in London, a relatively small thing with rich shiny tilling. So Shaun knows that when paper burns it burns big and bright and hot, that it burns into ash so quickly that the heat almost seems like a dream. 

He watches the flames kick high and snuff out, and a cold desolate smirk pulls its way into his lips. After all, it’s oddly fitting, it seems everything in his life has always been paper and fire. 

* * *

_Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,_  
_only the things I didn’t do_  
_crackle after the blaze dies._

**Author's Note:**

> As always you can find me at my ac tumblr @fryesbian (where I post fandom and fic related things) and my main tumblr @flightlesskiwi(where I post poetry and just general thoughts and such). 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading, comments and kudos are always appreciated!


End file.
